Industrial equipment or assets, generally, are engineered to perform particular tasks as part of industrial processes. For example, industrial assets can include, among other things and without limitation, manufacturing equipment on a production line, aircraft engines, wind turbines that generate electricity on a wind farm, power plants, locomotives, healthcare or imaging devices (e.g., X-ray or MRI systems) for use in patient care facilities, or drilling equipment for use in mining operations. The design and implementation of these assets often takes into account both the physics of the task at hand, as well as the environment in which such assets are configured to operate and the specific operating control these systems are assigned to.
Low-level software and hardware-based controllers have long been used to drive industrial assets. However, the rise of inexpensive cloud computing, increasing sensor capabilities, and decreasing sensor costs, as well as the proliferation of mobile technologies and cloud computing with services oriented architectures have created opportunities for creating novel industrial assets with improved sensing and control technology that are capable of transmitting data that can then be transmitted to a network. As a consequence, there are new opportunities to enhance the performance value of complex industrial asset based systems using integrated industrial-focused hardware and computing control software.
Assets, including the asset components, typically acquire damage during assigned operations. For industries, a challenge is assessing a health status (e.g., state of damage) of an asset at a one or more points in time, and then scheduling appropriate maintenance or dynamically changing the duty assignment or maintenance to avoid unexpected failures or reduction in operational utility. Conventionally, a mix of sensors and analytics in condition-based and prognostic maintenance programs provide a simple threshold level for a specific asset such as an engine component, without any regard to system-level impacts and have no means to control the physical states of the assets or the processes which use them.
It would be desirable to provide systems and methods to improve optimized maintenance and operational control interventions of an integrated sensing and control industrial asset.